The Cheddar & the Ivy
Our ethics, some say, is like cheddar cheese: The more it ages, the stronger and more flavorful it gets. Others say our ethics is like English ivy: Unless you give it early support and train it to grow upward, it will never rise above the ground.
Among educators, it’s an age-old debate. Does ethics naturally improve as a child grows up, or is it determined by a course established in the earliest years? Is ethics a matter of maturity or of guidance, of nature or of nurture?
A survey released last week from a British university touches on those questions — and helps us understand how to create a more ethical future.
Researchers at the Centre for the Study of Integrity at the University of Essex have found a gradual decline in what they call “low level dishonesty” in Britain. Is it okay to drive drunk, smoke pot, throw litter, take bribes, or tell lies? Participants in the survey, asked to respond to these and 10 other questionable behaviors, could answer Always Justified, Sometimes Justified, Rarely Justified, Never Justified, or Don’t Know.
The least offensive behaviors, which fewer than a quarter of the respondents found to be “never justified,” were “keeping money that you found on a street” or “exceeding the speed limit.” At the other end, more than 80 percent condemned drunk driving, accepting bribes, and “claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled.” But overall, compared to similar data from a decade ago, Britain’s integrity shows some slippage.
Who has the highest integrity score? According to this survey, the well-educated are just as apt to be dishonest as the unlearned. What about wealth and occupational status? “The affluent and highly paid,” writes the report’s lead researcher, professor Paul Whiteley, “are no more honest than the poor and badly paid.” Even gender makes only a small difference: Females trump males in integrity, but only slightly.
The great discriminator is age. On a scale running from 15 (low integrity) to 60 (high integrity), the under-25 crowd averages 47, while the 65-and-over cohort averages more than 54. Only about a third of the younger set, for example, think you should never make up stuff on a job application. Half of the middle-aged set and three-quarters of those over 65 see that behavior as patently dishonest.
So are we cheddar or ivy? Do we age ourselves naturally into ethics or get steered toward it from our youth? The survey tells us that elders have more integrity and that the young have more tolerance for moral slippage, but that still doesn’t answer the cheddar-or-ivy question. Are we seeing what social scientists call a “life-cycle effect,” in which attitudes naturally change as we mature? Or are we seeing a “cohort effect,” meaning (in Prof. Whiteley’s terms) that “current levels of dishonesty among young people will continue as they grow older”?
In the future, will every age show youth to be less ethical than adults? Perhaps so. But will that effect be exaggerated because today’s crop of under-25s, having had the moral twig bent away from ethics, grows into less moral branches and limbs than its predecessors? Here the good professor is pessimistic. He cites other research on political values, finding that people’s partisan affiliations are essentially set during adolescence. He worries that moral values may operate in the same way. He’s in ivy camp.
I’m more for cheddar. I suspect morality doesn’t work quite the way that ideology does. It strikes me that the moral sense is essentially intuitional and aspirational. In my observation, we each come with an inbuilt sense of core moral values and we retain an aspiration toward goodness and honesty despite life’s buffetings. How else to explain the fact that prisoners we’ve worked with in the United States — young, often ill educated, and (in the ivy analogy) without much moral guidance in their youth — regularly tell us they aspire to lives of greater honesty and responsibility? They may not reach that goal, but they genuinely yearn for it.
What can educators do? It’s not enough to write off the ivies who never found an upward-soaring trellis in their youth. We have a positive obligation to help them overcome their acceptance of creeping, low-grade dishonesty. How do we know we can help? Because, in the end, they’re more like cheddar than ivy. That doesn’t mean we stick them in a moral cheese-ripening cave and wait for them to get better. But neither do we give up on them because nobody coaxed them upward in their youth. We build character by guidance as well as by patience, through immediate interventions as well as through long-term seasoning. And in the end, we shamelessly mix metaphors: As the twig is bent, so ripens the cheese.
